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Friday, August 20, 2010

I’ve just finished my extended tutorial, I’ve got my new horse, what do I do now?

In most cases there is an NPC that sends you to someone else in town to get you started, after that keep your eyes peeled for biohazard icons floating over NPC’s heads.

These are your indicators that they have a mission for you or that you have one completed for them. If the npc has a mission for you to do then it the icon looks like the left one, it looks green on the mini-map but yellow in the game. If you are currently handling a mission for that NPC the icon shows up in red.

Run out and do your missions, if you decided on a tradeskill town you might end up acquiring all of the recipes you will need to start your tradeskilling career through questing, so don’t let those chips burn a hole in your pocket and buy any tradeskill book you see, wait until you’ve hit a couple of towns or decide that you REALLY have to have that book.

When it’s time to buy those books or even sell some of the garbage you got off the prairie chickens you killed earlier you visit a merchant, they are represented on your mini-map by poker chips, the standard currency of the area.

In this mini-map you can see:

The name of the starter town ( Clinton FARM )

a number of merchants

my character position ( middle chevron )

my mount ( green square at the bottom)

the weapon workshop ( knife icon on the building to the top)

some minerals ( orange blobs top left )

the waypoint for my current quest ( red X top left )

another player heading Northeast ( white arrow bottom )

non-mission NPCs ( white dots )

Quite easy to read once you get used to it, but it can get busy especially in the towns that have many merchants.

As I mentioned a couple days ago my current playtime is being spent on Fallen Earth where my character(s) is a clone that has been taken out of storage to help some people in the Hoover Dam defend it from attackers.

The Hoover dam episode is Fallen Earth's tutorial that introduces the player to the game and its controls. Following the tutorial your clone body awakens in a LifeNet facility and you are given a choice as to which community you wish to start your new life in, you are then re-started in the LifeNet facility at that community.

Since my time in beta they have added an "extended" tutorial quest line that teaches you how to use an ability, how to gather a resource, how to manufacture an item and ends up giving you a "vehicle" in the form of an "Old Nag" horse. Due to the extended tutorial the introduction to the new world is a little less jarring, or that could have been due to my previous experience with the game. I guess the developers are going to be further extending the opening quest lines to make the introduction to the game even easier.

Once you're out in the world you get your standard "kill this guy" or "collect 10 of these for me" quest lines along with the make some of these for me and I'll teach you how to make other things quests. The "kill this guy" quests sometimes include a tracking portion where you basically follow waypoints to "track" someone out into the wastes before finding them. There are also escort missions where you go get someone who is missing or wandered into trouble and have them follow you back to the mission giver, usually getting attacked one time by whatever was keeping them from returning on their own.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

I’ve probably started writing different updates and comments at various times but I haven’t completed them or thought them worthy of posting. I think for this I’ll just let people know what’s up.

I’ve stopped playing WoW, it’s been over a month and a half since I’ve had my accounts active, though I’ve been asked a number of times to help my wife using her second account. I’ve been pretty adamant about not playing unless there’s a dire need on her part. I had already planned on quitting when the Real-ID blowup happened and that just sealed the deal.

I wasn’t too happy about Blizzard’s requirement that your login name be an email address, I felt it was a security risk. I think my concern was valid and believe it has been proven, though only anecdotally. I believe they have had more account hacks than ever before, at least I hear about them more from my wife, who had been hacked herself recently. I would bet that most people are rather lax about using their email address for everything else including random WoW forums and addon sites. Leading to an easy way for hackers to acquire valid login names.

Add to that the idea of real names being posted in forums along with an automatic association of your WoW account with your facebook account by the company that you expected to protect your personal information and I was furious. It was after these announcements that I decided that Blizzard had become something that I never thought they would, a money grubbing corporation that only worries about themselves and not their customers. I have read some things that attribute this to the merger with Activision and I wouldn’t doubt it.

So what am I doing now that WoW is out of my life?

Well I was sent an email from Fallen Earth for returning customers to get free trial up until August 6th without any restrictions. I took them up on the offer and became engrossed again in the exploration and crafting aspect of the game. I decided to support this small MMO and bought a copy of the game and subscribed and I’m currently taking 3 characters through the first “sector” of the game. I’ve played my crafter the most, he’s recently learned how to make all the components of a dune buggy and knows how to put the thing together. I’ve just got to save up the resources to make it, it’s over 100 scrap steel as well as other hard to find parts. I’ll probably start posting a little bit of information about my travels in the post-apocalyptic world.